The Sociology of School Shootings
Before I start this, I would just like preface it with the fact that what happened on Monday is a horrible tragedy, and we should grieve with everyone personally connected to the victims.
That said, I think I should introduce what I want to say by citing some media sources around the world and how they are presenting this story. First, my home page, the BBC: Virginia massacre gunman is named is the front page story today. The first few paragraphs talk about Cho Seung-hui, the shooter, and his background. Then we go to the New York Times, headlined with Virginia Gunman Identified as a Student. The story below that is Gunman Described as Angry and ‘Always by Himself’, which goes on to give a comprehensive description of the gunman and his psychological profile. We also throw in France’s Le Monde which headlines Malgré une lettre, le geste du tueur reste un mystère (translates roughly as “Despite letter, the motive of killer still a mystery”). All of these sites have the mugshot of Cho with the headline. So you’re probably asking, okay, Alex, what’s your point? Well, most of these papers (especially the Times) are focusing on this event like it was one kid with psychological issues. Noted that there is an insert here and there with a chronology of US school shootings, but I can only assume this is because of the sheer magnitude and bloodshed of this shooting surpasses what this country has seen before in recent years.
My point is that now, right after this has occurred, we’re asking all the wrong questions. We are asking “What was wrong with this kid?” when I think we should really be asking “What is wrong with us?” What do I mean? Well, example:
The great thing about the internet is that before or after a major event (before elections, after an attack), you can damn be sure that someone’s put together some useful tools for getting background information. I found this page someone put together with the Google Maps API: Map of World School Shootings. This outlines every place in the world in the past ten years where there has been a school shooting. Out of 47 shootings, only 9 have not been in the US. 38 school shootings in the United States in only ten years. 38 in a country of 300 million people; that’s compared to 9 in the rest of the world that has a population of over five and a half billion.
So what I’m saying is that there is something wrong with this country when we have that many school shootings, and what we really need to investigate is what our social problems are before we try to file this away in the slew of individual problems we think plague our society. The problem with our thinking is that it is grounded in the notion of Western individualism, the idea that we are shaped almost completely by our own actions and whatever problems that occur in society are psychological. But let’s face it, even Émile Durkheim — quite possibly one of the most conservative figures in social theory — disavowed this notion. His study of suicide published 110 years ago implicated different societies (differentiated by nations) as a major cause in suicide rates of its members. I’m saying we really need to find out what’s behind these actions rather than scapegoating the psychology of the individual as “oh, well, he was a ‘loner’” or “That kid was kind of weird.” In Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine he points out the Lockheed Martin weapons facility in Littleton, Colorado and links it to a culture of violence and war that we have in the States. Though Michael Moore is generally quite the reductionist, it still raises a good point.
Anyhow, this culminates to how we should deal with an event like this. I heard on the Diane Rehm show this morning a few security experts wondering how to prevent this from happening again: ideas including locking down the university and metal detectors. This, of course, is stopping a shooting from happening on an individual level, controlling those people who are “weird”. What we really need is a re-evaluation of the kind of culture we have and what parts of that culture socialize that kind of behavior. The news media would be an excellent start. Lewis Black says in his post-9/11 album, “What we needed the day after 9/11 was a history lesson in Islam, the countries we were dealing with, and the people we were dealing with. But we didn’t get that. Instead there was this goddamn ticket scrolling across the bottom of screen saying things like ‘TERROR IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD’ What the fuck?” And that’s the kind of sensationalism and fear mongering we’re getting now at a time when we should be looking into the overall culture that has been created and the social relations that end in tragedies like Monday’s.
Feel free to leave comments and continue this dialogue in your communities.
Filed under: Social Relations | 2 Comments
I agree with you that we need to examine our society more than its individual members in situataions like this. I also think we need to stop plugging our ears and insisting that America is the best country to ever exist on the face of the earth ever and be more realistic and willing to change and improve.
After looking at that map, I’m also curious if there’s a reason (other than population density) that the shootings marked mostly occur on the East Coast and Midwest. Is there something about the culture of the Plains States and West Coast that makes them less focused on violence? Do they have more inclusive, supportive communities? Maybe there’s no real reason, but I wonder.